Starting with small steps

Come September 2013, we are finally all in.  It is still very cold and I wondered if I would ever get used to the cold and having a fire going again.  One of the first things we did was to get the vege patch going.  With summer coming on I didn't want to waste one bit of it.

I bought 5 straw bales and a truck load of compost mix.  I didn't want to wait for the weeds to die if I sprayed them, so decided to create the garden using the lasagne method.  I put down newspaper - 3 sheets thick all over the area, then put straw down about 30cm thick and then pile the compost on at about 40cm thick.  Gave the area a good water and walked away.

 

This is the area 2.5 months on.  The tomatoes at the back left in the photo, went nuts as did most of the other plantings, we lived on lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions, cucumbers and potatoes all summer.

I also planted zucchini early summer and we were able to freeze bags and bags - perfect for casseroles or frying with onion and tomatoes.  Our corn did not do so well and I think it was because I planted them to far apart, so growing corn has now become the challenge.

The New Arrivals

The next thing was getting some chooks, so I bought 5 and one rooster.  They all got names and settled in really well.  

This was there little house and pen, they were let out during the day to free range all over the back yard.  Pretty soon we were getting eggs every day and it was fantastic to be able to eat a fresh egg.  The colour is so different to supermarket eggs - it is bright and has a beautiful rich taste.

With a plethora of eggs I was starting to enjoy baking again.

The property had a fair bit of gorse on it, so we thought "let's get a goat or two".  We went to buy two, but the seller only managed to catch one, so "Bertie" came home with us - a white cashmere goat.  We dropped Bertie off in the top paddock and he looked a bit lost with all that land to himself.  Bertie then decided that we were going to be his pack, so he perfected jumping the fence and ending up at our back door.  So, after a week of playing the back in the paddock game we decided to get him some company.

We bought Bertie 4 dorper sheep to keep him company.  One was supposed to be a ram but turned out to be female.  We had 4 sheep and no ram.  Bertie was happy with his new friends and stopped jumping the fence.  He quickly let the sheep know that he was the boss.

The good thing now, was that the paddocks that had been neglected for years were now getting mowed and fertilised.